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Beyond the New Jim Crow

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Beyond the New Jim Crow Volume 9, Issue 1 March 2016 ______________________________________________________________________________ Beyond The New Jim Crow Author: Mechthild Nagel Title: Professor Affiliation: SUNY Cortland Location: Cortland, New York, USA E-mail: [email protected] Keywords: Prison Industrial Complex, Excarceration, Race ______________________________________________________________________________ BEYOND THE NEW JIM CROW Abstract This article challenges contemporary critiques of the U.S. prison system and argues instead that we are experiencing a penal system that most resembles the dehumanizing conditions of nineteenth-century slavery. Through revisionist histories and examinations of international trends in penal management, it argues against simplistic reform and instead advocates for excarceration. Introduction Dedicated to Tiyo Attallah Salah-El, penal abolitionist There are prisons, and there are prisons. They may look different, but they’re all the same. They’re all confining. They all limit your freedom. They all lock you away, grind you down and take a terrible toll on your self esteem. There are prisons made of brick, steel and mortar. And then there are prisons without visible walls, prisons of poverty, illiteracy and racism. All too often, the people condemned to these metaphorical prisons--poverty, racism and illiteracy--end up doing double time. That is, they wind up in the physical prisons, as well. Our task, as reasonable, healthy, intelligent human beings, is to recognize the interconnectedness and the sameness of all these prisons, and then do something about them. --Rubin Hurricane Carter, 1994 Volume 9, Issue 1, March 2016 78 Michelle Alexander’s (2010) bestseller The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness has sparked a social movement and moral outrage across the United States. It is noteworthy that Black law professor Alexander’s liberal analysis of the legal, historical landscape resonates with a heterogeneous public such as Black anti-prison activists and white conservative politicians who are rethinking the War on Drugs. This essay intends to clarify the ideological differences between those who critique the prison industrial complex and those who question mass incarceration. I argue that instead of witnessing the creation of a new, racist criminal justice system, we see a continuation of neo-slave penal conditions from Lincoln’s emancipation decree of select groups of Black people in 1863 until today. So, instead of a “New Jim Crow,” we clearly see a legal justification of permanent servitude and civil death reserved for a people in the U.S. legal apparatus beginning with the dehumanizing codification of an enslaved human counting as “three fifth of a person” (sic). Alexander’s liberal, reformist argument is in line with those who demand a decriminalization and decarceration policy change at the federal, state and local levels. It is a reformist tactic which avoids tackling systemic inequalities faced by poor and racialized communities across the United States. Abolitionists demand that nothing short of excarceration (and reparations owed to Black people) can overcome the horrific and enduring legacy of chattel slavery. I argue that Black prisoners and Black feminist critiques of the prison industrial complex and of the 13th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which codifies state-sanctioned slavery, have paved the way for a protest movement against the carceral state. I suggest that Angela Y. Davis and Mumia Abu-Jamal (2014), drawing on W.E.B. DuBois’s concept of abolition democracy, give a richer, more nuanced context of the persistent criminalization of Black men and women within a capitalist system than Alexander’s critique of the reemergence of a racialized caste system in the context of mass incarceration. In order to understand the endurance of enslavement and the paradox of existence-in-Black, one needs to address the overlapping realities of slavery and prisons and go beyond labeling the prison crisis as a new Jim Crow. Penal abolitionist Angela Y. Davis gives us an important corrective to Alexander’s liberal paradigm with the pertinent phrase “From the prison of slavery to the slavery of prisons” (Davis, 1998). In the following, I present a revisionist criminal (in)justice history that not only focuses on the violence of state institutions and state actors but also includes Black insurrectionist actors, who have been left out of Alexander’s non-abolitionist narrative. Hers, by contrast, stays safely within the ideological framework of reforming the racist system, tinkering at its unjust edges, namely over-incarcerating non-violent drug users, who make up about 25% of the prison population. Problematically, she has very little to offer in terms of decarcerating measures that would strike at the core of the carceral state. Her book does not give us a blue print for a sound justice (re)investment for those who have been effected the most by the oppressive systems of colonialism, genocide, slavery, white supremacy, capitalism, militarism, and public hetero- patriarchy. By contrast, abolitionist critics of the prison industrial complex seek to understand how (total) institutions interlock and how we mobilize effective resistance to repressive laws and agents. Volume 9, Issue 1, March 2016 79 State-Sanctioned Slavery: From Slave Codes, to Black Codes to COINTELPRO Whereas prison abolitionist Angela Davis notes the seamless “transformation” of chattel slavery into penal slavery, Alexander’s argument is based on a three-stage theory of repressive systems: slavery – Jim Crow – war on drugs, each brings a little more freedom or less total control by the state (p. 22). I will borrow her three stages to develop a dialectics, a dance of emancipation and repression, a spiral movement of life and death, highlighting three epochs, a variation on a theme: (1) the end of slavery brings the Emancipation Proclamation (1863) along with the 13th Amendment to the Constitution (1865); (2) the end of Black Reconstruction ushers in the repressive era of Jim Crow; (3) the end of Jim Crow culminates in the Civil Rights Voting Act (1965), along with the illegal Counter Intelligence Program (COINTELPRO) of the FBI and the war on drugs. Instead of joining Alexander’s appealing progressive narrative, i.e. that each period ushers in a little more freedom for Black Americans, I argue the opposite is the case, making the case for abolition and reparations even more urgent. (1) The meaning of emancipation in times of slavery: Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation mirrors the elites’ love-hate relationship with the oppositional couple of liberty-slavery. A benign reading may suggest a moral and legal paternalistic commitment that liberty is to be enjoyed in its full range only by some, even where its appeal is universal: “All men are created equal…” and thus enjoy full access to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” Of course, the same constitutional text also enshrines the right of slave-holding states to count “others” as three fifth of a person, even when those “persons” are otherwise labeled as chattel, objects, not citizens. This contradiction, liberty and equality (for some, not for all), of course fuels the abolitionist imagination, creating a mass movement across the North (and Great Britain) to topple this torturous regime once and for all, just as the Haitian brothers achieved in their revolution against the French colonialists and slave masters. (In fact, Haiti is the only nation-state that defeated both slavery and colonialism and had to pay dearly for its victory.) At the height of abolitionist fervor, the Underground Railroad, repressive legislation with the Fugitive Slave Act (1850) is passed to engulf the entire union in the legal reality of chattel slavery (in apprehending “fugitives from service or labor”), and it finds judicial support with the equally infamous Dred Scott (1857) landmark decision: Black people (deemed free or unfree) are not entitled to citizenship or even personhood on American soil. Lincoln came up with the brilliant strategy to free only those Black men and women, who were enslaved in states hostile to the Union at the onset of the Civil War. Slave states who supported Lincoln and the Union were allowed to keep their Black populace enslaved. At one point, he also favored deportation of Black persons to Liberia. Thus the stage of such fractured commitment to total freedom was set for the convoluted logic of the 13th amendment to the U.S. Constitution. Titled “Abolition Amendment,” it sets slaves and indentured serfs free at the same time as it not only restricts freedom to those under legal penal control but effectively codifies state-sponsored enslavement of human beings. Furthermore, the radical demands of Frederick Douglass and Volume 9, Issue 1, March 2016 80 other abolitionists, namely, access to land for a landless freed people, were not granted, nor any other substantive measures that would go beyond guaranteeing mere survival (if that). (2) The meaning of Black Reconstruction and Jim Crow: In his magisterial work Black Reconstruction, W.E.B. DuBois (1935/1976) argues that by 1876, Black people were arrested for trumped up, frivolous charges and his analysis of the brutality of the convict lease system leaves no doubt that “they were compelled to work … as if they were slaves or indentured servants again” (p. 698). In the immediate aftermath of the Civil War, the Civil Rights Amendments (14th and 15th) along with the Union soldiers’ presence in the defeated south ensured that freed men (not women) were enfranchised, served on juries, and were elected to public office. Black people proved their moral standing as worthy citizens in a white supremacist polity that on the other hand wanted to show that Black people were savages and needed to be controlled by brute force, hence the birth of the Clan, as a paramilitary, terrorist organization that ruled the south and parts of the north with orchestrated acts of intense violence, including murder. Angela Y. Davis (2005) notes that the death penalty, found to be objectionable in discussions over instituting the modern prison system, was kept within the American slave codes.
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